What beauty is going to stand by and wait while I finally make the heroic effort to crawl out of this kitchen and become famous and maybe even rich? I thought sadly. What I’m striving for, the material part of what I’m striving for, Steven Grey has had since birth. No woman’s going to take my stupid road with me. Who needs excuses like, “You know, I’m still a failure right now, but I’m very talented; wait, dear, just a little longer!” Why should she listen to my stories about the lunches and breakfasts I made and how I shined the boss’s shoes and went shopping and suffered physically and spiritually, and sat by the window, just as I was doing then, and got depressed?
What woman is going to be interested in me when she can make the acquaintance of somebody who’s already there, who already has something — of Steven Grey, six feet two, bearded, forty years old, and the owner of numerous elegant companies? “Who the fuck am I to beautiful women!” I yelled, pounding my fist on the table. The glass with ice fell off the table and broke on the kitchen floor. It was apparently the sight of gold that had brought on that little fit of hysteria, and the Kuwaitis, rich as swine, and the whiskey I’d drunk, very good and strong. “Who the fuck am I to them!” I repeated. Steven’s rich and has a house that looks romantically out onto a garden and the river. What do I have? An old suitcase as old as I am given to me by my parents and a couple of obscure books in Russian I wrote in anger and disgust with the world.
Christ, how sick and tired I am of them all! I thought. I’d like to go into the dining room during lunch sometime, and instead of clearing away the dirty dishes and serving them salad and a cheese tray, spray the boss and his wine-drinking friends with a few rounds from an AK-47 or a no-less-celebrated Israeli Uzi! That day would have been a very good day for it — the fairy-tale Kuwaiti sheiks were an even more tempting mission than Steven Grey was. (The servant Limonov imagined the blood-spattered sheiks on the Persian cushions, imagined them slowly falling over onto the cushions.) It’s possible that one of the Kuwaitis even fucked my Elena, I thought, that he burst into her pink cunt with his black prick. Why not? It’s very possible in fact, I reasoned to myself.
And what was it all given to them for, those billions? I tried to comprehend. I’m not exactly sure what for, maybe simply because there was oil on their land. Probably that’s all. Mere luck? All right. And Lodyzhnikov got what he has simply because the bourgeoisie happens at present to like ballet — ballet has taken its fancy — and pays hard cash. More luck. My Gatsby was left money by his father, luck again, right?
That’s a lot of luck, don’t you think? And I for some reason haven’t been so lucky. True, it could all have been different with me. If I had written different books, I wouldn’t be a servant sitting by the kitchen window now; if I had exposed Russia and its social system in a talented way, if I’d helped America in its ideological struggle against Russia, I’d be sitting on my own estate like Solzhenitsyn. Or I’d be speeding around the streets of Hollywood in a Rolls-Royce, hopping from party to party, and since I’m still fairly young, I’d have as many of my beloved rich whores as I could want. What am I doing in the kitchen?
After my monologue I picked up the New York Post, which Gatsby in his haste hadn’t had time to read, and immersed myself in that yellow rag. Jenny’s brother Michael Jackson had warned me about reading such trash, but I still read it. The Village Voice is full of lies too, only liberal ones.
It turned out a lord had been murdered the day before, a cousin of the Queen of England. A handsome lord, old, tall, and majestic. A former admiral with connections to India — its last viceroy. The Irish killed him; they want independence from Britain. To live on their own. Obviously they think killing lords will immediately solve all their problems — the hunchbacks will stand up straight, all those who don’t have money will perhaps suddenly have it, and the impotent will at once find their cocks suffused with the blood of life. The simple common sense of a housekeeper suggests to me that the hunchbacks will remain hunchbacked and that the national state will help neither the impotent nor the dispossessed, although those who guide those murderers will certainly take their places among the Big Brothers — without a doubt. They never miss.
A powerful bomb exploded on the lord’s fishing boat. There were two pages of photographs in the Post devoted to the lord’s life. Pictures of him walking majestically with a rajah, and standing like a tower to one side of an old man suffering from dystrophy and wrapped up in a piece of white cloth — the old Ghandi. And the lord’s wife standing on the other side like another tower. And an Indian landscape in the background.
I averted my eyes from the newspaper and wondered why they regretted the lord’s death by bombing so much. He would have gotten sick or expired of old age, bedridden and barely able to open his mouth, smelling bad and annoying his servants and no longer in possession of his faculties. Would that really have been better? This way he died like a soldier, the way he should have, blown up by a bomb. I envied him. A man ought not live to the point where he has to crawl. It’s ugly and dirty.
A few pages later in the newspaper I found, by way of illustration for my thoughts, a picture of a hospital ward with several human bodies hooked up to artificial life-support equipment. The caption under the picture said they’d been lying like that for years. Vegetables. Why keep them going? What’s the purpose of that degradation? I’d rip the hoses from everybody hooked up to life-support equipment. I’d go around to all the hospitals and cut the hoses or turn off all the switches. Cruel? No, honest, even noble.
Something we don’t understand has happened to us, to people, to the human race. We’ve gone down a dead end, maybe, or we have developed in some mistaken way. I don’t know what, but something’s wrong, I told myself while rummaging through the paper. And then the telephone rang.
It was an acquaintance of mine, somebody whom I had inherited from Jenny and Martha and who at one time had been Martha’s boyfriend. He’s twenty-five to twenty-eight and works as an assistant manager at the huge Waldorf-Astoria. His name is James, James O’Brien. Even the disciplined and hard-working Martha used to call James a slave — Martha, who never missed a day of work! Probably James O’Brien deserved that epithet. James occasionally drops by die kitchen out of habit to chat with Linda and me for a while, just as he did with Martha. Linda and I don’t encourage him, but we don’t chase him away either. We tolerate him.
“Do you want to go to a movie, Edward?” O’Brien said over die phone. “I and my boss, Youssef, are going to one tonight. Several girls are coming with us.” James has very refined manners, and so he added, “I’m sure you’ll like the film very much, Edward; it’s The Seduction of Joe Tynan. It deals with intellectual problems very important for our time.”
I wavered. Another time I’d have refused without hesitating — I usually don’t go out when Steven’s staying overnight — but that day or the next was a damned full moon, and I was already a little crazy, or maybe it was just that I was getting sick of it all.
“All right,” I said to O’Brien, “let’s go to a movie.” And attempting to find out more, I added, “And what about the girls, are they nice?”
“One of them is very nice and very intellectual,” O’Brien answered with the voice of a robot. “She isn’t going with anybody, and you can have her if you want, Edward.” James is fond of words like «intellect» and “intellectual.”
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll see how it works. Where are you meeting?”
The Egyptian Youssef was planning to drop by James’s house, and so I set off there too, a place I’d never been before. James lived, it turned out, not far from me or the Waldorf-Astoria — on Fifty-fourth Street near the corner of Madison.
Despite his excellent address, I realized almost as soon as I set foot in his apartment that I’d come to him from another life. Everything in the apartment was shabby and of poor quality and messy. A filthy couch, a couple of silly faded hassocks of indeterminate color, and a dark blue carpet which James had picked up at
his hotel for nothing, as he immediately bragged. He still hadn’t managed to put the carpet down, and I found him cutting it up when I came in. Either James was a jerk-off and couldn’t put his one room in order — and he could have made it attractive; it even had a fireplace — or maybe I as a servant of the world bourgeoisie had already gotten so spoiled by the millionaire’s house that all life outside it seemed paltry and dirty. I don’t know, but the impression made on me by my visit to O’Brien’s apartment was disheartening, even though we left almost immediately after the Egyptian Youssef showed up. Youssef, O’Brien’s boss, was a short but very self-assured person, and he somehow calmed me down. He reeked of sweet perfume.
We were supposed to meet the girls near the Little Carnegie theater next to Carnegie Hall and the Russian Tea Room. There’s always a crowd of people there, including a lot of girls, and as I strode down Fifty-seventh Street with O’Brien and Youssef I tried to make out in the distance which ones were ours. I was in for a disappointment, unfortunately. Ours were the worst. Two short, frightful-looking girls carrying purses and dressed in baggy jeans and something like slippers, with asses that almost dragged on the ground, and both wearing shabby velvet jackets. I got very upset, since I was wearing white boots from Valentino’s, blue and white striped pants, and a white jacket. With my tan I probably looked foreign and very mysterious, and now I was going to have to walk down the street with these eyesores. The girls felt awkward with me too, I think, but who could have foreseen such a situation? James was always neatly dressed and wore gold-rimmed glasses, so there was no way I could have known he would have such eyesores for girlfriends. He worked like a slave, Mr. O’Brien, sometimes even two shifts in succession — twelve hours a day, and he was on his way up, hoping someday to become manager of the Waldorf-Astoria Towers. Millionaires always stay at the Towers, as do heads of state and their wives, and the world’s few remaining kings. Come on, O’Brien, I thought, a careerist should have better girls.
“You’re always in such good shape, Edward,” O’Brien said to me in passing, his eyeglasses flashing. He obviously sensed that I was holding myself a bit aloof and was unhappy with the girls’ appearance. “Do you exercise?”
What the hell would I need to exercise for? I thought. All I had to do was spend fifteen years of my life half-starved, so that now that I have enough to eat, I’m no longer capable of getting fat. I muttered something innocuous to O’Brien.
Our whole group, I thought, I, a housekeeper, and they, the employees of a fashionable hotel, remind me of the crowd that went around with Clyde Griffiths, the hero of An American Tragedy, a big two-volume book I read many years ago in Russia after discovering it in my parents’ library.
The movie turned out to be extremely boring — about a senator and his personal life. The senator’s wife leaves him. And she leaves him at the very moment he’s nominated for President at a party convention. And his lover leaves him, and his daughter doesn’t love him, only it isn’t clear why. And the daughter’s so hysterical, it’s as if she’s forty and not fifteen. But the senator’s career is more important: he loves his work; he’s a bureaucrat by calling. And even though he’s unhappy in his private life, he’s nominated as the party’s candidate, and the crowd applauds, and even the senators who are his enemies applaud, and the balloons go up, and the music thunders and roars. And everybody in the theater learns that the senator too is a human being. As for me, I never doubted it, even without the film. A senator once stayed with us briefly at the millionaire’s house. Not for very long, but long enough for me to understand that he too was a human being.
The senator came from the airport one evening in a limousine with a briefcase and bag. We briefly introduced ourselves to each other. He said he was a senator; I told him I was the housekeeper. In appearance he looked rather like a male model — the face of an actor who does lotion ads. You know, a very masculine face, tanned, with large, massive features. A “real man.” The first thing he asked me after putting his briefcase and bag in the guest room on the third floor was whether he could bring a lady to spend the night and where the cognac was, since he was planning to come back late. He also asked me to show him how to turn on our complicated television equipment. The servant Limonov showed him how everything in our movie theater worked — which buttons to push and in what sequence. I also showed him where the cognac was, not even forgetting to point out where we kept the snifters, rarely ever used, since cognac makes the master’s face break out. With regard to the lady, the servant brazenly informed him that whether or not he brought a lady back to the house with him was of course a personal matter the senator would have to decide for himself, but that if I was not mistaken, Nancy was supposed to come down from Connecticut early the next morning. “Nancy has urgent business in New York,” I cheerfully lied.
The limousine waited for the senator. I handed him a key and showed him how to open the door. I had no intention of staying up for him; in fact, I planned to go to bed. Although already on his way out, he still stuck me with an errand — to call Room 816 at the Park Lawn Hotel and say that the senator was already on his way and would meet the lady in the lobby. I closed the door behind the senator, went to the kitchen, dialed the number, asked for Room 816, whereupon a sweet little voice, redolent of perfume, and belonging, I’ll bet, to an elegant young whore, drawled into the phone, “Y-e-e-s?”
“The senator has already left for the hotel and will meet the lady in the lobby,” I said in the conspiratorial voice of a movie spy and hung up.
So I already knew something about senators. While I was watching the movie, I tried to think of an excuse I could use to leave my companions as soon as it was over. It was clear to me that it would be even more tedious afterward. We would go to the cheapest restaurant we could find, maybe even a coffee-shop, and after we’d eaten, O’Brien and Youssef and the girls would add up how much money each person owed, even writing it down with a ballpoint pen on a paper placemat, and there would be yet more boredom and awkwardness. By the time the movie was over I had come up with something. I told them I was expecting a phone call from Europe that night, that somebody was supposed to call me from France at a certain time, and I had to be home when they did. I left them at an intersection with a sense of relief. The Egyptian was unquestionably glad to see me go, and parted with me in a very friendly way. Now he can certainly fuck one of the draggle-ass girls, I thought. If I had stayed, he wouldn’t have been able to. The Egyptian reasoned very practically — since a cunt was already there and indeed walking nearby, it remained only to bring matters to a conclusion. With me, aesthetics and social issues inevitably get mixed with the business of fucking. Thank God there are normal people too.
I went home by myself, independent and mysterious, went back to my own elegant East Side and as far away as possible from ordinary people and their petty lives. It was better not to be with anybody. Or to have only my professional relationship with my boss — I wasn’t ashamed of him, at least. He’s rich and healthy. I was ashamed of the casual acquaintances I’d just made, for some reason.
After I got home, I had something to eat and then wandered around the house. As I’d suspected, the boss still wasn’t home; he was obviously staying over at his lady’s place. I sat in the TV room, flipping back and forth among the channels for a fairly long time. If the boss turned up, I would hear the door close and have time to slip up to my room. Not that there’s anything in the house I’m not supposed to do. It’s just that I like to avoid those evening encounters with him and his ladies for my own reasons, out of my own sense of delicacy. I went to bed at four a.m. feeling closer to Gatsby than to anybody else on earth — odd, isn’t it, gentlemen? As I was falling asleep, I made a discovery; I suddenly understood the reason for my being in the millionaire’s house. I needed the atmosphere of dreams, and the millionaire’s house is the closest thing to dreams there is in this life. Further from normal life and closer to dreams, I thought and then fell asleep.
I was already up
by six and sitting in a pine oil bath. Through the skylight above me I could hear that the birds had just awakened and were beginning to sing, and I too was cheerfully singing a song: “I wanna fuck somebody who is good… ” A busy day lay ahead, and here I was copying the boss, even down to the bath oil, which I’d swiped from his bathroom. Steven’s bathroom is located downstairs right underneath my own, and opening the dumb waiter, I could hear radio music and water pouring into his bathtub too. We were both up.
At seven, the housekeeper Edward, dressed in black serving pants and a white Pierre Cardin shirt and wearing a quilted Chinese jacket, was raking up the dry September leaves from the terrace and putting them in a big plastic bag. The mornings had grown cool, but the garden was still very beautiful. Steven was expecting the president of Rolls-Royce for lunch, and I, energetic and thoughtful servant that I am, and knowing the boss’s habits as I do, was sure that either before or after lunch Gatsby would take the president of Rolls-Royce and the other businessmen accompanying him out to the garden to sit in the late September sunshine and drink coffee on iron benches right by the East River and go through their papers there. That’s why the hard-working Edward decided to clear the terrace of the leaves that had already accumulated there in considerable quantities — so that they wouldn’t hinder the hard-working businessmen.
At the height of my pastoral labors on the terrace, Steven carne out with the newspaper and a cup of the coffee that had already been waiting for him in the kitchen.
His Butler’s Story (1980-1981) Page 31